For IT, think ‘yes we can’, not ‘us and them’

Safety is one of the main priorities for mobile device use, says Stephen Wilson of Sydney Water. Photo: Michele Mossop

Trevor Clarke

IT planning pays off

Universities, utilities and healthcare providers are switching on to the benefits of mobility.

End users need to be taught about the risk of data and identity theft arising from the convenience of greater mobility.

Occupational health and safety concerns are important to the preparation of mobility strategies.

Ever since developers and engineers started to use their information technology innovations to deliver services to others there has been conflict. In fact, there is no reason to think early inventors – those of earlier centuries – had it any different.

On the one hand, there are those with the power to create, control and deliver technology services – the IT department lead by the chief information officer or independent software developer – and on the other hand, those who receive services (employees or consumers).

Rare is the organisation where the two groups live in perfect harmony. Indeed, the challenge of meeting end users’ desires is a perennial issue felt acutely by IT professionals. Grumbles about the quality of office technology is as much part of employee banter as the weather.

This relationship is no better represented than by the use of the term “lusers” – a combination of “user” and “loser”. It was coined at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and is still used by some IT circles to describe end users in a derogatory way.

But mobility and perhaps more pointedly, the consumerisation of IT, now have the potential to change this dynamic for good.

Most salient is the excuse the demand for mobility – especially from executives – provides CIOs and other IT decision makers to change the traditional enterprise IT mindset of first saying “no”, as it isn’t what the department has decided is appropriate, into saying “yes”, and delivering what end users want and need for the good of the organisation.

From stores and banks launching mobile shopping apps to lure customers, to logistics firms using analytical tools to improve supply chain efficiency, there are new examples of this proactive enterprise mobility every day.

Yet, ensuring a successful mobility approach is not as simple as just saying “yes” to things like bring your own device (BYOD), embracing tablets or having a mobile app. There is a critical need for the collaborative creation, education and enforcement of strategy that is specific to the mobility use case and industry.

“A policy is worthless if it is not read, understood and adhered to,” says Murdoch University director of IT services Ian Sanderson. “And that ultimately means the end user must buy into it and the policy must be entirely comprehensible to the user.”

The university has two end user bases to consider – students and its employees. For the students, who mostly bring their own devices, the university has deployed Wi-Fi hotspots across the campus and launched a mobile website providing services such as calendar and maps.

While IT did the coding for the website, it collaborated with the university’s digital media team for things like styling and to understand user requirements.

“At the moment, it is fair to say our development of our mobile offering for students is mature, advanced and I think highly successful and popular,” Sanderson says.

“In terms of what we do for staff, then the big discussion there comes down to the question of either us providing devices which we can control and manage, or this emerging interest in BYOD.”

To date Murdoch University has provided smartphones and iPads to employees. A BYOD approach is now being considered. For Sanderson, it isn’t feasible any more to dictate terms to this user base of budget holders, who are often individual researchers, but the security and confidentiality of data policies are critical.

While he acknowledges getting the human resources and legal departments involved is a useful step in setting up a mobility strategy, more important is education about the policy.

“Make them understand there are a lot of people out there that are determined to get their data and empty their bank accounts – that usually works quite well,” Sanderson says.

Getting users educated will be a critical task for SA Health’s mobility strategy, which is also set to embrace BYOD. The South Australian healthcare organisation is in the midst of strategy change, which involves having critical software rolled out to business units spanning 14 hospitals and four local healthcare networks across the state.

The biggest part is an enterprise patient project called EPAS, which will use Sunrise Clinical Manager from Allscripts, SA Health CIO David Johnston says.

“That is a $408 million project. The first site goes live on March 3 [2013],” he says “We have finished the design, the build, the production systems are up and we are in functional testing at the moment.

“The highlight is going to involve mobile users. The overarching strategy is very much to have large enterprise class systems of which there will be four primary ones – EPAS, pathology, imaging and financials – each of those will have a single instance and then a mirror in separate data centre. It’s a radically different strategy to what pretty much all of the other states have. When Allscripts goes live on March 3, we are preparing at the moment a bring your own device policy.”

The policy is expected to be finished in November with the longer term strategy to be device agnostic.

Apart from surgical theatres where only cleanable medical devices are permitted, clinical staff will be able to use devices of their choice, in addition to organisation-provided devices, to access the Allscripts app with wireless hotspots that are being deployed in all of the hospitals.

While Johnston isn’t sure what the mix of devices will be (he expects iPads to be used heavily and has a moratorium on Android due to security concerns) he is aware of the fact that he faces a considerable period of training for his most important stakeholders – clinicians.

“Because of these new products we have to train 30,000 people. So it basically touches just about everybody in the organisation. It has an iPad app, you can go up to a bedside computer, which does patient entertainment as well, and you can use EPAS there,” he says.

“You could go to a nurse’s desk station and you could have a workstation on wheels or a laptop you can roll around. So we are going to observe what the pattern of use is going to be. We are going down the path of ‘we will not let technology be a barrier’ and the answer for connectivity will be ‘yes’ –it’s just a matter of how we do it.”

In contrast to Murdoch University and SA Health, Sydney Water does not have any plans to support BYOD.

Instead it has a fleet of organisation-liable devices including just under 400 staff using BlackBerry smartphones, 1700 notebooks and a small number of iPads managed through a mobile device management (MDM) tool.

There are 400 Panasonic vehicle-mounted Toughbook devices used in the field, where occupational health and safety regulations heavily inform the mobility strategy.

“Safety is our main priority and the use of these devices is governed by lots of policy, which is very explicit in terms of when and where they can be used,” says CIO Stephen Wilson. “The safety of our employees and contractors is paramount.

“When we instigate a program of this nature, the business unit, which is the delivery unit, is very much the owner of the technology and they have people in their own group that manages the change. The IT department gets involved at the application layer, and it is a support layer rather than the usage in the vehicle in terms of safety and compliance then.”

In short, when it comes to field workers the key stakeholder to ensure lines of communication are strong for IT is the business unit owner.

“When you are talking about staff that are field workers and mobile, that is certainly the purview of the general manager that looks after the employees in that area.”

There are many other elements to consider and stakeholders to engage in addition to the security, education and OH and S factors in each of the three examples outlined in building a successful mobility strategy.

This can include, but is not limited to, things like engaging human resources and individual business unit leaders to assist in setting policies for enabling teleworking, to ensuring finance and legal departments have the rules and tools in place to make determinations on BYOD questions – such as who pays for the mobile broadband contract and who keeps the phone number if an employee leaves.

Although many IT leaders prefer to offload responsibility to other business leaders for anything not related to a narrow definition of IT service delivery, the mobility movement – and the fact it demands collaboration between business leaders and between IT and employees to be successful – is an opportunity for CIOs to achieve greater business alignment and focus on driving outcomes proactively.

It is an opportunity to flip the “lusers” mentality of the past, where IT was separated from the organisation in an “us versus them” way, into a collaborative and team-oriented “yes” mindset.